Initially, I thought that you were talking about ordinal vs cardinal numbers (ie first vs one), which was a bit confusing. But, when trying to understand the placement of zwei in the German graph, I realized that you meant that the points on the Y-axis are sorted relative to one another rather than relative to the Y-axis scale as a constant.

I see that such plotting could be useful in some circumstances (shows some interesting clustering in other languages) but, I don't like it.